Nine Lives (The Eternal Moment of Now) (2001)

An off-screen narrator remembers a time he was five years old, walking to school in a heavy rain, wearing a yellow slicker and cap. He relates to us that a boy he'd never seen before ran up to him and said that it was raining worms. Our lad of five is on the cusp between believing anything he hears and entering the age of reason. He asks for proof. He holds out his hand.

Maarten, a 34 year old cell biologist, works on cloning. One night he dreams he has only seven days left to live.

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

Letters, Riddles and Writs is a one act opera for television by Michael Nyman broadcast in 1991.

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, King Boy D and Rockman Rock, try to find and gain access to the mystical White Room. They leave a party at their house and drive in their 1968 US Cop Car through night-time London and the dusty plains of the Sierra Nevada region of Spain. There they face judgement: will they be allowed to enter the White Room? Meanwhile their lawyer David Franks tries to find a loophole to free them from their contract with Eternity.

At the height of Reign of Terror Maximilien Robespierre orchestrates the trial and execution of several of his fellow leading French revolutionaries including Georges Danton.

Young Chinese-American filmmaker Wei-ming travels from New York to his childhood home on Lamma Island to make a video documentary about the imminent opening of a Disneyland theme park in Hong Kong. While doing research for the project, he meets Larry, a dancer/choreographer.

Chapter Two represents a continuation of daily observations from the environment of Manhattan compiled over a period from 1980-1981. This is the second part of an extended life's portrait of New York.

Hutton's most impressive work ... the filmmaker's style takes on an assertive edge that marks his maturity. The landscape has a majesty that serves to reflect the meditative interiority of the artist independent of any human presence. ... New York is framed in the dark nights of a lonely winter. The pulse of street life finds no role in NEW YORK PORTRAIT; the dense metropolitan population and imposing urban locale disappear before Hutton's concern for the primal force of a universal presence. With an eye for the ordinary, Hutton can point his camera toward the clouds finding flocks of birds, or turn back to the simple objects around his apartment struggling to elicit a personal intuition from their presence. ... Hutton finds a harmonious, if at times melancholy, rapport with the natural elements that retain their grace in spite of the city's artificial environment. The city becomes a ghost town that the filmmaker transforms into a vehicle reflecting his personal mood.

A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.

Six men. The forest. The menace is there somewhere. Armed, ready, looking for action, they wander, day and night, striving for a confrontation.

Moody, atmospheric ghost story starring Mason as a retired tradesman who purchases an old mansion that has been vacant for 40 years because it is believed to be haunted by the spirit of a young woman who had died there. Unaware of the mansion's reputation, Mason and his wife Mullen move in and hire a young woman, Lockwood, to keep house. Soon after Lockwood's arrival, strange things begin to happen in the household, and it becomes apparent that she is possessed by the spirit of the dead girl, though Mason scoffs at the idea. On death's door and bedridden, Lockwood asks for the same doctor who treated the woman who died 40 years ago. He arrives and treats her. The next morning Lockwood is cured, and it is revealed by the police that the doctor's dead body was found in his carriage hours before the time Mason claims he arrived to see Lockwood. Convinced that not only the ghost of the girl but that of the doctor as well entered his home, Mason finally believes in the supernatural.

A film documenting the landscapes of northern Iceland, as well as a recent work about the Hudson River.

In a 13-minute navigation, Nestler takes us downstream the Rhine River. The opportunity of cheap water transport kept prices of raw material down and made the Rhine one of the most important arteries of industrial transport in the world.

KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.

The same day of their marriage, Jean's wife dies of a strange ailment in the middle of surgery. Afflicted by the loss, the young man abandons his medical studies and takes refuge in the memories of his time of courtship. At the same time that this happens, a wave of murders shakes the city with the same pattern of behavior: the victims are surgery students whose bodies have had both hands amputated.

Abel Hradscheck, the owner of an inn in the Oderbruch country, faces financial ruin. For this state of affairs, Ursula, his wife and former actress, is by no means free of blame. She is a "newcomer" to the area and even after eleven years in the area, still a "stranger". A Cracow company announces that a money-collector is on his way to the innkeeper. Mr. Szulski arrives and the debts are settled - with money supposedly stemming from an inheritance. The next day, Szulski departs but according to the maid and the stable-boy, behaves in a very strange manner. Soon afterwards, his carriage is discovered in the Oder River, but there is no trace of the drowned man. Hradscheck's neighbor starts casting suspicion on the innkeeper. The Counselor of Justice, who heads the investigations has the spot under the pear tree dug out. A dead body is exhumed...

The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were applied to construct illustrations of temporal symmetry, duality and transposition — time-based equivalents of musical compositional principles such as counterpoint and serialism. Astonishing temporal interventions — a 180-degree pan gazing downward on a New York City street that progresses from day to night, an image of Mount Rainier in which the foreground and background unfold in different time planes — unfold as symbolic transformations of natural and urban landscapes.

BOSTON FIRE finds grandeur in smoke rising eloquently from a city blaze. Billowing puffs of darkness blend with fountains of water streaming in from offscreen to orchestrate a play of primal elements. The beautiful texture of the smoke coupled with the isolation from the source of the fire erases the destructive impact of the event. The camera, lost in the immense dark clouds, produces images for meditation removed from the causes or consequences of the scene. The tiny firemen, seen as distant silhouettes, gaze in awe, helpless before nature’s power.